An often gripping novel of a superpowered scientist.
An astrophysicist with a surprising new ability fights against a group that threatens to bring down society in Schrijver’s debut thriller.
David Haas comes back from an expedition to French Guiana with a strange condition that later becomes known as the Scourge. At first, the fungal infection enables him to make others see what he sees and duplicate his movements. Journalist Kara Burke, his colleague on his South American mission, finds out about his new powers and invites him to meet some mind readers in Paris. David discovers a connection between these telepaths and Alexander Cross, who fell into a coma on that same French Guiana trip and subsequently disappeared from a Paris hospital. It turns out that the Scourge has turned Alexander into the megalomaniacal gang leader Lucifer, who’s been turning telepaths and conjurers into his own personal army, which he hopes will infect humanity and take over the world. He kidnaps David, but before Lucifer can turn him, he manages to escape. To combat Lucifer’s forces, David and the French army seek to recruit their own superpowered troops and create new technology, but will that be enough to avert disaster? In a world that’s still dealing with a lingering pandemic, readers will find that Schrijver’s book is certainly timely, and he takes the clever approach of cobbling together a history of the Scourge based on David’s recollections (“Hopefully, time has dulled the sharpest edges. I’ll find out”), with his adult grandchild’s investigations filling in gaps in his memory. The narrative jumps around somewhat, echoing the chaos of David’s mind. He, Kara, and their mind-reading acquaintances are characters worth rooting for, although their helpful military allies don’t stick around for long. Lucifer doesn’t come across as a stereotypical megalomaniacal villain, as he receives a healthy amount of complex characterization. It all results in an engaging story of a scrappy group of underdogs who must find a way to save the world.
An often gripping novel of a superpowered scientist.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9798364492753
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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